Scott Smith, sales director of Foothills Brewing, holding a bottle of their Baltic Porter

Lots going on in the beer community today in North Carolina. It’s the five year anniversary of Pop The Cap, which lifted the ban on beer over 6 percent in the state. Foothills Brewing is marking this date in history with the limited bottle release of their Baltic Porter, one of the brewery’s high acclaimed beers. The beer is available at the brewery in Winston-Salem and well as Sam’s Quik Shop in Durham. Later today, Fullsteam will celebrate their grand opening of their tasting room. A private party starts at 4pm followed by the public opening at 6:14 – the average time for beer o-clock in England and the name of their mild beer from their Workers’ Compensation Series of beers which also includes Rocket Science IPA and El Toro Cream Ale.

Public policy shapes everything from the price to the availability of the beer we enjoy. Whether it is a new tax on beer or farm subsidies, politics have an impact on the brewing industry. Sometimes the changes are subtle, in other cases, such as Prohibition, the impact can dramatic.

The president of the United States is not the only power broker to hold sway over the fortunes of brewers, but the power of the presidency certainly can be felt like the IBUs in an India pale ale.

When it comes to beer and politics, what is good for brewers tends to be good for beer drinkers. A case in point is the Pop the Cap campaigns in North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgians for World Class Beer that were successful in the past few years in changing post-Prohibition restrictions on the maximum alcohol content allowed for beers sold in those states. Overnight, with the passage of state legislation, beer drinkers in places like Charlotte, Spartanburg and Macon could suddenly enjoy barley wine, strong ale and Baltic porter.

Presidential policy decisions have a national impact. They can bring boons or busts for beer. Every vote does count when you are the person setting the direction for the nation’s beer drinkers. Here is a round-up of the Best and Worst Beer Presidents.

The Good

FDR: Nothing to Fear About Beer Itself

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the 32nd president at the height of the Great Depression in 1933. A key plank of his campaign was repeal of Prohibition, which had failed in practice and turned many law-abiding citizens into criminals. Prohibition not only destroyed the American brewing industry, it had a devastating impact on restaurants, hotels and taverns.

Roosevelt sensed the mood of the country, which had shifted away from temperance and could no longer suffer silently through the loss of jobs and tax revenue. He supported the Democratic Party’s decision to write the repeal of the 18th Amendment into the convention’s platform. On Nov. 8, 1932, FDR trounced incumbent president Herbert Hoover by a margin of 57.4 percent to 39.7 percent. He would be reelected three more times and lead the United States during World War II.

In addition to establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps and gaining approval for the Tennessee Valley Authority during his first 100 days in office, FDR pushed Congress to change and ultimately repeal the Volstead Act, which had ushered in Prohibition. In fact, the return of legal beer was one of Roosevelts’s first accomplishments in one of the most productive administrations in history.

Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, and wasted no time in attacking Prohibition. On March 22, 1993, Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, which allowed the federal government to collect taxes on alcohol, while giving states the right to regulate the sale of the beer, wine and spirits. The bill effectively ended Prohibition by allowing 3.2 beer (3.2 percent alcohol by weight or 4.0 percent by volume). Roosevelt is quoted as saying “I think now would be a good time for a beer!” after signing the legislation. On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified repealing Prohibition.

Carter: Homebrewing was No Small Peanuts

James Earl Carter Jr. served just a single term as president. Jimmy, as the 39th president was better known, campaigned as an outsider at a time that much of America wanted a change in the way Washington did business. On Nov. 2, 1976, Carter beat incumbent president Gerald Ford by a margin of 50.1 percent to 48 percent.

Carter’s administration was plagued by economic and diplomatic problems. Inflation, unemployment and high interest rates hammered the U.S. economy. On the international scene, President Carter led a boycott by 65 countries of the 1980 Olympic games in Moscow over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. There was also the Iranian hostage crisis, with more than 50 Americans being held for 444 days at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Still, with all of this bad news during his administration, Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy and the Department of Education as cabinet level positions, and he was good for beer drinkers. In 1978, President Carter signed a bill that launched the largest home brewing explosion since the days of Prohibition. The law exempted homebrewed beer produced for personal and family consumption from excise taxes. The law still allowed states to prohibit citizens from making beer, wine, cider and mead, but soon homebrew shops began to open and Americans started discovering just how good fresh, homemade beer could be.

In Philadelphia, Russell is Joe Sixpack, a man who turned beer into a full time job: reason enough to admire him. He has also rather brazenly declared his hometown “America’s Best Beer Drinking City,” and slapped that tagline on a 10-day beer festival he helped organize called Philly Beer Week.

Mr. Sixpack’s boast doesn’t sit well in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. At the Brewer’s Association in Boulder, CO, officials stopped short of censuring him, saying only that Russell ought to be prepared to defend his claim over a place like, say, Denver or Boulder or Fort Collins. In a column that ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a day before the festival started, fellow beer writer Bob Batz Jr. wasn’t so sure that Philly was even the best beer drinking city in Pennsylvania.

Before we go on and I’m exposed, I ought to confess that I like Russell a lot. I wrote about him for another magazine and, afterward, took him up on an invitation to let him convince me about Philly. After four days with friends hoisting glasses in the South Philly Taproom, the Pub on Passyunk East (POPE), Capone’s, the Old Eagle Tavern, Monk’s, the Standard Tap, Azure, the Royal Tavern and, for good measure, a last Racer 5 again at POPE, I was in no shape to disagree with him.

Now, before you reach for your bung starter, realize that Mr. Sixpack has done us all a big favor. He has helped stir a national discussion about what makes a beer city good or great or even the best. We’ve had these debates from the time someone took note that there was more than one microbrewery in a city or that a neighborhood had suddenly sprouted several bars with exotic tap handles. Admit it. We love to fight over the best places to drink beer.

People used to pester Michael Jackson all the time for his favorite places. In 2000, he wrote that there were exactly seven great beer cities in America: Austin, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. Baltimore, Chicago and New York might be contenders, he said at the time.

Just two years ago, Celebrator Beer News declared that not only did it know that there were 10 great beer cities but knew what order they came in: Portland, followed by San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Diego, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Boston and a tie between Chicago and New York. The Web is choked with Top 10 lists.

Some of this is just spreadsheet work: numbers of microbreweries, brewpubs, good beers bars and homebrew clubs, population ratios and all that. But if it were merely a matter of mathematics, all of the lists would be exactly the same.

What is missing from all of the calculating is what Paul Gatza, the director of the Brewers Association, calls “the mystical experiences that people talk about.” It’s that heady feeling, impossible to quantify, that you are in a place among people who care as passionately about beer as you do. It is by this giddily subjective standard that Don Russell can claim Philadelphia’s supremacy. “Other towns, you sit in a bar, you could be anywhere in the United States,” Russell wrote in one of his recent columns. “You can’t drink beer in this city and not feel Philadelphia.”

And so, it is by Russell’s standard that I have been liberated to create my own, altogether different, list of beer cities. Without getting out the calculator, they are cities that have reached a certain critical mass in the availability of good beer. Unlike those Top 10 cities, they are not often recognized outside of their regions. Some are established stalwarts. Some are audacious upstarts. But they are all capable of making the argument that beer is an intrinsic part of their culture.

So as to ensure hurt feelings, I deliberately left off this list some fine beer cities: Milwaukee, my hometown, where I’ve probably had as much good beer as any one place in my lifetime; Baltimore, with its bewitching combination of locale, ethnicity and old and new brewers; St. Louis, where a certain brewing behemoth overshadows a vibrant craft brewing scene; and Austin, the city where my wife, Susan, and I have raised our children and where a major microbrewery (Celis) and a core of brewpubs have closed since the city made Michael Jackson’s list. While well known for beer, none of these has the same dynamism and momentum of the cities on my list. “Beauty,” as Gatza says, “is in the eye of the beerholder.”

Cubicles in the office building were filled with ACC bumper stickers, hats and even basketballs. The most interesting, or so it seemed at the time, included: “God May Be a Tar Heel, but Sampson is a Cavalier” and “If God Isn’t a Tar Heel, Why is the Sky Carolina Blue?”

On one visit, someone pointed out the lunch routine was changing this week. It was ACC tournament time, you see. The local bars filled long before tipoff. As I sat down at a long table underneath a TV, the person next to me poured me a glass of beer. I have no idea when I left. It was after the last game was over, sometime well into the next shift.

The hospitality was infectious and the friendships developed over barbecue and basketball have lasted a lifetime. Unfortunately, the beer, as it was in most places back then, was forgettable.

So it was with fond memories of Southern hospitality, and after many of our own attempts to smoke barbecue at home, that we returned to North Carolina last fall. Despite Mother Nature’s attempt to drown us in a hurricane, we meandered throughout the state for several days. This time, however, the beer was worth remembering.

The North Carolina legislature recently passed a bill nicknamed “Pop the Cap,” allowing breweries to produce beer over 6% ABV and legalizing sales of it as well. Local brewers were ready to prove they could compete with out-of-state rivals in all styles. And that they did.